Coming up on the 5th anniversary of the last bag day and thinking about the affect it has had on FRC since then. Has it accomplished what was intended? Has it leveled the playing field between low and high resource teams?
One thing I have noticed from watching a lot of Open Alliance content is how many higher resource teams seem to now be building Alpha and Beta robots. In this respect “no bag” may have not affected the gap at all. Those with more resources now just have more time to utilize them.
A real positive of no bag is that competition time is now just competition time. In the days of the bag teams had to use pit time and practice field to work on their robot and add/test all of the improvements they dreamed up between bag day and competition. Now competition weekend can be reserved for repair and tweaking instead of building. As a result, on field performance has likely benefited and competition stress has likely dropped a bit.
What do people think? Has the removal of STOP BUILD and THE BAG been a net positive or negative for FRC? Has it done what was intended or just created a new host of unforeseen consequences?
This was the case back during the bag era as well, and was an even larger driving factor in the resource gap. Teams would build “Practice Robots” and “Competition Robots” and would be able to keep practicing and iterating on the practice robot while the Competition robot was in the bag.
While this is true for a lot of OA teams, it’s still 100% possible to do very well without an alpha bot. We haven’t made a second bot since bag tag, and it’s going very well for us. (I think, at least not from 22-24)
I honestly think it’s better for us to only build one robots, it saves on design team resources and overall resources, and you can just interate on the subsystems mounted on the normal bot.
We would be in such a bad place right now if bag day was still a thing…
We built 2 robots one time during the bag era (2018) and I know it helped us get more practice and perform somewhat better, but for the resources/number of students I have it has not made sense to build 2 again since.
We build 1 actual competition robot and then we have 1-2 extra frames we mount things to for concept testing, prototyping, and programming and that helps enough for our needs.
For the last three years of bag we did two chassis, and tried to make two of all systems. We were not a high resource team by any stretch of the imagination, but we did our best to have a copy of everything that went into the bag for continued testing and practice.
Sometimes we would take advantage of the “30lb allotment” of custom parts to bring an entire subsystem to comp and swap onto the bagged robot. I KNOW we were not the only people doing that…
While I 100% would not go back to bag n tag, there was a little more excitement around Presidents Day weekend. And really late nights working. A lot of those.
I miss having a hard 3rd party deadline before our first event that it had to be done by, but the quality of robots and autonomous has vastly increased with the additional time. Lower resource teams aren’t at as much of a disadvantage by not being able to build two robots to legally bag and practice.
I am glad it is gone the way of the CRIO and it’s expansion cards. I’m glad it’s gone with PWM motor controller that the signal cords fall out at the worst time because it’s the world’s loosest DuPont ends and you had to hot glue it all to keep it in. I’m glad it’s gone like having to box and crate your robot just adding on to the expense for teams and headaches for coaches who now have to become freight experts.
Good riddance to Lockup forms and hoping to whatever you pray to that the students didn’t lose it all year long.
I do miss the CAW/BOM sheets. Those are still useful and I highly recommend them. But there were so many terrible things in the previous “Era” that these students don’t need to worry about . It eliminated so many silly barriers to entry and made my life as a coach easier. I hope FIRST keeps communicating with Mentors, Coaches, Students and does more like KitBot to keep trying to make it easier on everyone to get the basics out of the way.
FRC is only sustainable when the people in it are having a good time throughout it. Mentors burnout from red tape and bureaucracy. Keep it simpler whenever possible.
Personally I feel less stressed and burned out because in the break before we were stressing about what you can do with a bot in a bag and spending time in scouting apps, trying to plan autons with no testing and worrying that what you put in the bag isn’t ready.
We always stayed busy even after bag day, I’d rather be busy on the bot if I had the choice
We have mentors far more regularly take a break and go on vacation in the middle of the season than we used to. Last week our lead programming mentor was out. Next week one of our lead mentors and our lead awards mentor will be out. Knowing we’re in it for the long haul makes it easier for individuals to take some amount of time to recover mid-season when we have sufficient mentor coverage. I have a lot of sympathy for teams with less mentors where this isn’t a feasible strategy.
If we still had bag day this would’ve been like the worst week of my life. I was planning and attending a funeral, out sick leading up to that and as the head coach I ended up missing 6 meetings. With Bag Day I would’ve felt like I was horribly letting the team down being gone at the most critical time. That’s all just timing, but I am very very thankful this was one thing not on my list of worries.
Wow 5 years sure go by fast! Don’t know I guess Bag and Tag day being gone surely has huge benefits. I got to be on the transition point of the Bag and Tag day, and that helped us continue perfecting the robot becuase some parts that we orderd where retained on the border (I was a student on a Mexican team) that leighten the stress of not having by a specific date a robot ready for comps, as other years that would have been a huge doomsday. There might also be some benefits to having bag and tag but i guess that is really subjective to anyone.
We definitely built the entire upper part of our robot in 2009 to be under allotment and walked in with it and got a lot of nasty looks and inspector attention
One thing that I really didn’t enjoy about crate/bag days, is that once you hit the 6 week mark, a ton of kids dropped off and disappeared, even though the work was definitively not done. Drive practice on the practice robot, and improving mechanisms to bring with you to competition. Also, wasting the entire practice day bootstrapping on an upgraded mechanism. No bag/crate is just so much better.
So much has happened since then… it’s hard to separate out the end of bag with the COTS explosion, expansion of public designs like the Everybot (and now the expanded kitbot), or the impact the pandemic had directly on teams. My team is half the size we were pre-pandemic, and the drive/motivation of the team feels completely different than it did.
Then there are personal differences, like the fact that I’ve worked from home since the pandemic hit - it makes getting out of the house to go to a meeting feel entirely different, and it helps with the time-based stress that I always felt pre-pandemic (getting out of work, getting home to take care of the dog, grab dinner, and then rush to a meeting takes its toll!
I feel like we’re in a different world than we were back then, neither better nor worse, just different for so many reasons.
I’m very thankful for the end of bag day; I partially credit it’s removal for sparing my team from dissolving. It really allowed us to notice what we were doing wrong year over year and fix it during the season, rather than kinda noticing it in the 6 weeks and forgetting it right after, repeating the same mistakes year over year.
Ending bag day was a big help to time-constrained teams… teams that average <=10 shop hours per week. I’m sure it has been the difference that enabled fielding a working robot for numerous teams in that category, and maybe the difference between sustaining the team vs. not.
Time goes fast. (Of course COVID was in there too, so it seems less)